"Pending Agenda": The Central Bank opened the door to cryptocurrencies for a potential second term of Milei

The Central Bank (BCRA) opened a door that had previously remained ajar: the possibility for the Argentine payment ecosystem to advance into cryptocurrencies and other digital assets. While this will not happen this year, nor next, the agency expects this topic to gain relevance during a potential second term of Javier Milei. "You didn't ask me about the dollar and crypto. That's fine, because nothing is going to happen this year. But it will in a second presidency of Milei," said Juan Curutchet, Superintendent of Financial and Exchange Entities of the BCRA. The statement came just as he was about to leave the stage at Pulso 2026, the event organized by the Payment Media Chamber. This definition marks a shift from the stance the agency adopted in 2022 when the Central Bank prohibited banks from operating digital assets. At that time, Banco Galicia and Brubank announced a new service for their clients to buy, sell, and have their cryptocurrencies held by the institution. Less than 48 hours later, the Central Bank published a regulation that halted the launch, justifying that the decision was made to mitigate risks for users and the financial system. Now, the official did not provide specifics on whether this prohibition could be lifted or what other measures could be considered. But he left it as a pending discussion. "In a country where the perception of vulnerability and fragility has significantly decreased, more than today, and with full economic freedom, these are topics that need to be advanced. Today we have a level of fragility that does not allow us to advance much. But I believe there is a pending agenda for later," he added, in a one-on-one with Juan Ignacio de la Torre, member of the Board of Directors of the Payment Media Chamber of Argentina and Senior Vice President and General Manager for Southern Latin America of Fiserv. The change in perspective is understood within a broader discussion that the Central Bank is having about the financial and payment ecosystem. For Curutchet, Argentina has a relatively small banking system, a product of decades of currency deterioration, but has built a sophisticated payment system in parallel, driven by the innovation of banks, fintechs, and technology companies. The regulator's vision is "to let it run and see how you enter," although this creates the problem of always being "chasing behind" with regulations. In that sense, the official acknowledged that the Superintendency was "orphaned of resources" to keep up with the sector's growth and mentioned that the BCRA modified its structure and created a specific management to oversee the universe of payment service providers (PSPs). "There are defects in the asymmetries: some activities have more regulation than others. Some differences are reasonable, but in other cases, it is no longer reasonable for them to have less regulation. If you go too far, you stifle innovation or create barriers to entry. And here lies the legend or the myth: most fintech companies started from scratch, with few resources, in students' garages. It is part of reality. If on the first day I ask you to have a diverse board or that if you don't have 20 years of experience in the banking sector, I won't allow you to start, you won't get off the ground. With that, we would lose a lot of creativity. That's why we need to find that balance," he reflected. However, less regulation cannot mean a lack of controls. Curutchet anticipated that the BCRA will seek a stronger application scheme. The idea is for the agency to set minimum standards and act quickly when a company does not comply. In that sense, he emphasized that there must be a mechanism that flows more when it comes to suspending or removing players who fail to comply, to avoid a situation like the one that occurred during Mauricio Macri's presidency with exchange houses. If entering the system is relatively easy, he proposed, leaving should also be easy when the rules are not met. "During Macri's time, as there was currency freedom, there was no need for so much regulation regarding exchange houses. We had about 300 licenses and nothing happened. When currency controls were reestablished and exchange houses were not regulated, undocumented individuals, NN, began to appear, living in precarious conditions and posing as owners of exchange houses. They accessed the MULC and took advantage of the gap. Today you don't have that incentive from the gap, but there are other perverse incentives due to the State, such as the check tax where arbitrageurs take the collection. That contaminates and discredits a lot. For the BCRA, agencies and exchange houses have been contaminated by what happened, and we must prevent it from happening again," he said. Fraud was another topic of debate. The official mentioned that banks underreported incidents to avoid reputational risk and that after the BCRA reinforced the obligation to report them, the number of reported cases increased by 150% in five months. The logic is that information circulates among different players to prevent a fraud modality detected in one entity from being repeated in another. "There is always creativity for this, a new scam always comes out. That's why we need to ensure that the rest finds out so it doesn't happen again. There, cooperation between the public and private sectors is very important," he concluded.

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